The fight had come to its brutal conclusion, giving Penndarius a moment to contemplate what had happened: the gruesome deaths of his friends at the hands of cold-blooded killers seeking knowledge that he possessed. And yet, he lived on. The assassins had failed, thanks to this crimson warrior who had intervened on his behalf. As Penndarius ran through the events in his mind, he slowly gained focus, which allowed him to make decisions more clearly.

A few yards away, Soren momentarily contemplated the broken kirin beneath him and then hauled himself off it. He looked under it and found that one assassin was still conscious, so he grabbed him by the collar and brought his face close.

"Have the echoes of my past finally come to call?" he asked.

The assassin laughed at Soren's question with a slight wheeze, and a fleck of blood stained his lips. "Aye, and he cannot wait to meet you," he replied honestly.

The assassin's candor was not surprising to Soren, and he set the man back down.

"Damn!" he cursed under his breath and turned to locate Penndarius.

He stormed over to the young scholar and grabbed Penndarius by the shirttail. "I am getting you out of the city now," he said, "away from the assassins’ silver blades."

The scholar quickly disengaged from Soren's grasp. "I will not leave!" he exclaimed. "I cannot leave," he insisted in a whisper.

"You will leave if I have to cut you off at the knees, boy!" Soren yelled, and he pointed behind him with his thumb at the pile of assassins and kirin. "That is no bunch of common rabble," he raged. "They are all killers born! I will see you safe, and then I can deal with my brother...alone."

"Then see me safe after the day is done, and allow me to find out why killers took the lives of my friends. I want to know why! These killers did not attack me on a whim. Someone is pulling their strings, and I want to speak to him," Penndarius replied stubbornly.

His stare was unrelenting until an event from earlier that day sparked his imagination. He saw a mental image of an assassin burning his translation work, purposefully, as if that were the true goal. "They wanted to silence me to destroy the information I possess," he said, and his eyes opened wide as he realized the implications.

The warrior cocked his head to the side. "What do you mean?"

The scholar took a moment more to contemplate what he was thinking before recounting it to Soren. "Today I was delivering my interpretations of a tracing from a tablet that was found at the Helkrif excavation in the Scar. A piece of information in my notes was obviously damaging enough to someone that they would kill to silence it, and I have to figure out why," Penndarius insisted.

"That could explain why you were marked for death. Damn!" Soren cursed and started massaging his temples. "Things have just gotten more complicated." Penndarius walked past Soren to leave the scene.

"Where are you going?" Soren demanded.

Penndarius kept walking. "I need to get to my room at the inn. I have more notes there that may be able to shed some light on this situation."

Soren quickly caught up with him and stepped in front of the scholar as they walked.

"Fine. Even if you have a death wish, the least I can do is get you to someplace safer." Systematically he began moving people out of the way to clear a path for the scholar, who followed behind him.

As they walked toward the inn, they failed to notice a unit of the White Guard standing on the other side of the road.

The city was built near the side of a white mountain almost level with the clouds at its peak. A cave-like tunnel wound through the mountain to the top and ended in a ledge that protruded tenaciously into the brutal winds.

A woman was standing on the ledge, dressed from head to toe in the finest silvery silk. Her pristine clothes shone like platinum in any kind of light. Even flecks of dirt from the stone floor of the cave could not stain the fine fabric.

She was blessed with long platinum hair that complemented her clothes elegantly, and they fluttered together, streaming in the damp wind. Her face was angular and strikingly beautiful, with delicate cheekbones and a chiseled nose, flawed only by the sharp lines of anguish that clouded her countenance.

She stared out into the distance as if watching a sight beyond reality, and it caused her face to tighten even further in pain. The wind sent a warning with howling urgency, and she wiped her hair from her eyes to clear her vision.

Something was amiss. There was a wrongness in the air. The sixth sense in her mind knew what it was long before it was fully evident. A familiar thought wracked her heart with sharp pangs of unease, an ominous forbearance that preceded a vision.

Before her, the clouds roiled and beat together in a heated battle that was moving inexorably closer. The great bellies of the clouds were ever fuller and darker, precursors of the rain to come. They huddled together and then broke apart. They collided and clashed with one another to set forth their wet gift upon the land.

From within the clouds, shapes began to appear, augurs of the future, given to the woman as preludes to events to come. The clouds moved and shifted, and an image appeared from the chaotic masses. It was a denser column, shaped roughly into the form of an oval. At first it was no more than a stark sliver amongst its gray brethren, but as the storm moved closer it was beginning to become more prominent and showed itself fully as the storm formation covered the city.

The sliver widened and became taller and larger than the cloud in which it had originated. It was pushing every competitor out of the way with a force that was immeasurable. From within that mass something new was stirred, moving and shifting outward, and as the oval widened, new shapes were birthed from the curves of cloud.

A doorway formed, and from within it emerged unspeakable horrors. Grasping claws and gnawing teeth reached toward the woman on the ledge, threatening to consume both her and the city nearby. Then, surpassing the hunger of the lesser creatures within the doorway, another more powerful presence began to emerge.

At first it was just a feeling in the pit of the woman's chest, but slowly it became something far more terrifying. Her breath quickened even more, and she forced herself to remain standing under the pressure of its aura.

Huge, smoldering, sapphire-hued eyes appeared and resolved within the doorway of what must be their owner's cage. Great indigo claws grabbed the threshold and pried it even wider. Slowly it thrust its presence from within its prison into the open. As it did, its eyes glowed brighter and sparked with luminescent lightning, and a dangerous maw opened below them. Long, dagger-like teeth glinted harshly in the pale light of the storm, malicious things that threatened to tear at the fiber of her soul.

Slowly that great fanged mouth opened wider and wider till it was larger than the city and the mountain. Ready to descend upon the land, it encompassed the sky as far as the eye could see. Long, jagged lines of otherworldly cobalt lightning arced through its teeth and eyes and then struck the ground.

The woman could feel that there was an undeniable simplicity to its wants and needs. It wanted only to take and consume, break and destroy everything.

Then, as the great evil was about to fall on the land and take its very essence, the clouds broke into rain, and the vision dispersed.

The woman with the silver hair had to shake her head to clear away the ominous visions, and then she collapsed to her knees under the strain of the ordeal. Rain pattered against her luminous tresses and began to wash away the vision from her mind.

She gasped as she tried to catch her breath. She moved her matted hair from across her eyes and looked up. The sun was shining down on her, and she sensed a ray of hope arising amidst the fading chaos. It was faint, but it was there, and she knew that whatever it was would lie in the city below her, in Deiyil.

Aedan raised his hand to the sky as the last drops of the brief shower fell. It had been short and powerful but had passed just as quickly as it had arrived. Even the usual residual heaviness in the air was missing.

He squatted down on the road where Soren had made his stand, pulled up one unconscious assassin by the hair, and looked impassively into the man's pale face. After a few moments of examination, he shrugged and dropped the man's head to the pavement with a dull thunk.

Aedan looked over his shoulder to see what his brother was doing. Jadice was not far away and was doing roughly the same things near where the kirin lay. "More mysteries. Kirin are not normally permitted in Deiyil, so how did they smuggle it in?" Aedan wondered.

Jadice crossed his heavily shielded arms and shook his head in amazement. "This was an impressive battle."

"We find more questions and no answers," Aedan said, biting his lip and running his hands through his curly hair in frustration. "Did you see the pendants?"

Jadice nodded. "Aye, the same as at the inn. It seems that someone angered a brotherhood of some sort," he responded. "Is it related to the assassination attempt on the Speaker?"

"No, that man was an anthra, and they are a noble people," Aedan said as he shook his head. "My gut tells me it is a separate incident, though it may be related in ways that we have not yet fathomed."

Jadice walked over and placed his hand on his brother's shoulder. "What shall we do now?"

"That one tried to kill a man we’ve been seeking, Soren, and these others likely followed Penndarius Greyson with the same intent," Aedan replied. "We cannot let this stand, little brother."

"Aye," Jadice agreed.

A guardsman walked up and saluted the brothers.

"Lords, some of the spectators say they saw the man with the red vest who was in the conflict, along with another, headed to the inn from whence you arrived."

"Curious. Now they head back to the place where it all started," Aedan said, exchanging a knowing glance with his brother. "I wonder if Soren is with Penndarius."

"Clean this up," Jadice commanded a guardsman as they left quickly to head back to the scene of the earlier crime.

As they ran, Aedan called out to his brother, "I sense there is more to this than we can imagine." 

- End of Episode -

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